At 16:00 8/27/2001 -0500, Aimee Farr wrote:
Tim May:
So I guess my candidate submission for the P.E.T. workshop might not be well-received: "BlackNet; Case History of a Practically Untraceable System for Buying and Selling Corporate and National Secrets.
No, you want E.E.T. -- "Espionage-enhancing Technologies."
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Section 1831 Economic espionage
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This is not legal advice. It's an obituary. :)
Owning a vehicle that will exceed the speed limit is not a crime. Driving a vehicle that will exceed the speed limit is not a crime. Exceeding the speed limit is a crime and is a ticketable offense, at the least. Mechanisms to maintain privacy and anonymity are no different, use of those same mechanisms to commit crime is not a death knell for those mechanisms just as manufacturers do not stop producing and selling vehicles that are capable of exceeding the speed limit, even though some people do speed and are ticketed or given warnings, at least. You are entirely too smug and happy, at the thought of these various mechanisms useful for preserving privacy and anonymity going the way of the dodo. Tim may be correct, in his assessment on your deserving what you receive.
think of people selling their expertise when some guild says they are forbidden to.
I talked about this before, as an OSINT channel for the U.S. Government.
o BlackNet has legitimate intelligence applications.
It also has legitimate applicability for Joe Sixpack and Suzy Winecooler, who don't want a zillion ads and cookies clogging their bandwidth and cache, who don't want targetted ads or their surfing habits tracked and monitored, who certainly don't want their health insurance premiums to go up after they do research on some rare, incurable disease they are mildly curious about or after researching a more common ailment when a friend happens to be diagnosed - to lean on those old standbys.
o Anonymity can be a problem. You need authentication. You would like blinded biometrics.
The maintenance of privacy can be a problem, from a marketers POV, other things can be viewed as problems too, when the end consumer has proper control of self-identifying information. If the money is good, that level of authentication can be conducted in meatspace if it is truly needed - most times, it is not.
o I would think the ROI would be where you can shoehorn into existing intelligence channels and groundwork. That's either a sovereign, an intermediary wrapped in the skirts of a sovereign, a defense contractor, or an untouchable intermediary. If not bona-fide intelligence, you're left with the criminal element, IRA and so forth.
You leave many possible things out, you present a false summation of all the possible uses of Blacknet and maintenance of anonymity.
Most move product and still have distribution channels. Yeah, the IRA would like digital cash, they are buying arms with offshore debit cards.
This event by people acting criminally in another country (according to the rules imposed by past-rulers of that other country, heh) should be used to shape and mold US domestic policy and legislation for the care and feeding of US citizen-units how, exactly?
o It seems like _damn bad timing_ for a discussion in this context.
Bad timing? Who is disadvantaged by the timing of this discussion? Your handler said to slow the conversation down while they run some numbers and gets some surveillance in place, or something?
This should be couched in terms of a beneficial application, rather than something subversive.
Principle is like that. You don't like what others have to say? You should remove your own right to freedom of speech, before you attempt to censor others. (Good luck, once you've effectively removed your own right to free speech, on censoring anyone else). As a lawyer, you know or should know that most (if not all) of the most significant constitutional rights cases to be heard by the courts have involved criminals and other undesirables and unlikelies who pushed the edge of the envelope in their own defense. Just because I have a dislike for Charles Manson, does not mean I support movements to suspend all the rights affirmed under the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and other of the various Amendments we collectively refer to as the Bill of Rights, for example.
It's like the fall of Knights Templar in here. What happened to the pilgrims' safe passage?
When it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, it probably isn't a pilgrim. Reese